Yesterday my step-granddaughter had a painful moment of disillusionment, a small meltdown, because she realized that her ancestry was that of the villains, not of the victims. She is not a Native American. She has a mind for fantasy and has been in love with Native Americans since school started. For Christmas I gave her a little treasure of Native American artifacts from my own life, a beaded baby bracelet one of my mom’s friends at the Crow Reservation made for my mom when she was pregnant with me, a little pot made by Maria Martinez, a little mother-of-pearl owl from the Zuni Pueblo.
It made me think a lot about our current world and the twist of its propaganda. There’s no way to deny that Indians were treated badly by white people. No sane person would ever argue that, but the complexity of our lives should tell us something about the complexity of lives of people in previous generations. Especially now, I think, we should be a little humble making our harsh pronouncements. I believe that to understand ourselves, the first thing we have to do is realize that human beings don’t make sense or even, always, know what they’re doing.
I don’t think it’s possible for us to “make it up” to the Indians for what white people have done to them over the years. Can’t be done. We can just go forward from here. And beating ourselves up for the actions of white people hundreds of years ago? The thing we should be doing is recognizing — with relief — that we’re not there now. There’s really nothing more patronizing and hubristic than looking down from some white promontory and saying “I’m sorry for what they did to you. I never would.”
I wanted to talk to her about raiding cultures in general, and about alliances between some tribes and whites, including that between the Crow and the American army. I wanted to try to explain how history — and human action — is never all this or all that, and the best we can do in our time is attempt to do better.
I wanted to tell my little step-granddaughter about the people who lived in Beringia for so many thousands of years and of the great mixture of peoples that have been discovered in the limited DNA we have from their living years and how traces of that DNA are European. I wanted to tell her that science hasn’t figured out completed where they did come from. I wanted to show her that there was no America as far as those people were concerned or at all 30,000 years ago. That “America” is a made up thing, a word we use to communicate an anonymous location on the globe. I wanted to tell her how, when the waters began to encroach on these ancient peoples’ homeland, they just had to move and they did. I wanted to tell her that they didn’t all come at once.
Then I wanted to tell her about my Swiss ancestors who came to America on purpose to escape some of the same treatment that would be leveled on Native Americans, attempted genocide, the imprisonment of adults and kidnapping of children for re-education so they would not grow up Mennonite. I wanted to tell her about her Canadian great-grandmother who was one of the first women in Canada to become a medical doctor. I wanted to tell her about my Irish ancestors who were loaded onto unseaworthy ships and sent off to live or die, who cared? I wanted to tell her about my Scot’s ancestor who was a prisoner of war, enslaved, set to labor in the sugar plantations in Barbados.
I wanted to tell her about the myriad peoples and cultures that crossed the Atlantic on those ships and how the clash of values existed from the beginning. I wanted to talk to her about peoples’ relentless urge to wander, move, migrate and the various incentives that set them on their way. I wanted to talk to her about the perpetual struggle in humanity between good and evil, even within each one of us.
And then, the bottom line, that we are all tenants on this planet set to contend with the vicissitudes of our time.
*—Aldo Leopold, from “The Virgin Southwest”
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/rdp-wednesday-lightning/